December 22, 2009

Help, I Shot Myself!

For the longest time, I've been promising to change my Twitter profile picture. I've previously been stymied by a lack of desire and laziness, but after I came back from choir practice earlier tonight, I decided to go for it.

For reasons which I didn't initially anticipate, shooting myself took a bit longer than I thought. For example, I didn't think that focusing would be a big issue, but I must have taken at least fifteen blurred photographs of myself before I started seeing progress. Keep in mind that my 50mm lens doesn't autofocus on my D60, but even if I was using my autofocus-enabled kit lens, I still would have used the manual focus. In a situation like this where the photographer is also the subject, I can't rely on autofocus to make me look sharp.

Once I got the focus right, I had to try different aperture and shutter speed combinations in order to get the right exposure. On top of that, my pose had to be such that I didn't end up embarrassing myself. Not that I was going to upload this photo to a dating website, but you never know who will look at your Twitter page. For example, I won't mention names, but three famous people started following my Twitter account in the past few days.

After what must have been at least thirty minutes of experimentation plus a few more minutes of Photoshop tweaks (just lighting, nothing else!), here's my current Twitter picture.

Except for the hat, I wore this outfit to choir practice. Bonus tidbit: I got the shirt at Club Monaco for nineteen dollars. ;-)